Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Dad podcast. During the week, we give you a daily meditation,

drawing on ancient wisdom, giving you timeless advice to help you with your most important job,

being a parent. And then on the weekends, I have sort of a wrap-up conversation with my friend,

fellow dad, and writing partner

Niels Parker. We just explore what's going on in our lives, what we're struggling with as

parents, what we're doing well, what we want to do better, and what we've learned along the way,

and what we've learned in the last week. And here we go.

Hey, man, how are you?

I'm great. How are you doing?

Good. I was thinking about that post that we did for Daily Dad earlier this week. I thought it was a good one.

It was like, don't let a bad day affect being a good father. I'm just curious what that meant to you. You know, that's one of those things where it is very easy when your day starts out poorly or things start to

stack up on themselves for you to get lost in the difficulty of daily existence

and to get wrapped up in the narrative of victimhood or get start to sort of connect back this string of

hardships over the previous days or weeks or months, whether they are real or imagined.

And if you, even if you're not wallowing, that energy starts to accumulate and that time starts

to accumulate.

And before you know it, you have ignored either literally or figuratively your role as a father or as a parent.

And that energy that could have been directed toward teaching your child or even just being with them.

And the irony, of course, is that if you had taken even 20% of that energy and applied it towards spending meaningful time with your kid,

it could have broken this cycle of misery that was making your day bad to begin with.

We are very quick to get lost in our own narratives and it's a very dangerous place to be where no

matter what your intentions are have negative uh externalized consequences onto your kid so you have to be

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